


The Ghost Monk of Aylesbury

by astudyoftext



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Action/Adventure, Case Fic, Drama, Fandom Secrets Secret Santa 2013, Friendship, Gen, Mystery, Not Beta Read, Victorian Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-27
Updated: 2013-12-27
Packaged: 2018-01-06 09:49:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1105377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astudyoftext/pseuds/astudyoftext
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A classic case fic. Written for the wonderful <i>pantasma</i> during the fandomsecrets Secret Santa exchange.</p><p>Please be warned that it may contain triggers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ghost Monk of Aylesbury

Though both I and Holmes possess a degree of patriotism, there are times when I find the capital of our Empire positively insufferable. It is on early November mornings, awaking to the sight of the city as blurred with rain as the powder and rouge on the face of some crying beauty, that one cannot help but wonder as to why the Creator deemed it suitable to bestow this kind of dreary climate upon us. Was it that He intended for the folk of this country to idle in their beds until noon?

But the criminals of London, at least, employ the cover of fog and gloom for their own purposes, which is why it was more than once that I found myself roused at all sorts of ungodly hours to join Holmes in pursuit of this or that perpetrator of justice. And this time I lay, listening with half an ear to the unmistakable sound of his light yet energetic steps and to the whistle of the kettle boiling downstairs, and mused just what the nature of this new quest could be. I did not hear anyone enter; so, I reasoned, it must have been a telegram that informed Holmes that somebody was in need of our help. An express-telegram, too, judging from the early hour. This meant a client in a great hurry.

Some ten minutes later I descended the stairs, curiosity having got the better of me.

"Good morning, Holmes," I said. He turned to me, waved away the tobacco smoke that hung in the air between us, and offered me a broad smile.

"Ah, Watson!" he cried, "Good morning! I was hoping you'd wake up and spare me the necessity to interrupt your sleep."

Though there was a bit of a wild air to his appearance, his hair unkempt and his eyes wide, it pleased me to see him in a good mood; I even began to relent to the thought of going outside. And of course the smells of butter and brewing tea played their part in returning me amongst the living.

"So, what is it, Holmes?" I asked, making myself comfortable in an armchair in front of the fireplace. "A murder or a theft? A jealous wife or a dishonest husband?"

"It is just Mrs. Hudson's biscuits, for now," responded he. "We do not have a client yet, not as such. But he sent me this telegram-" here, Holmes dipped his hand in the pocket of his worn purple dressing-gown, produced a piece of paper and read aloud with a dramatic flair: "Need your help concerning the story of the ghost monk of Aylesbury! Urgent. Andrew Keegan. Will come at seven."

"A ghost monk? The fellow's sure got self-confidence if he comes to you with this at such an early hour."

"Quite. First, the story of a gigantic fluorescent hound, and now, a spectre. Your readers shall undoubtedly think that I changed my occupation to that of an exorcist." But his smile had faltered slightly. “Oh, but we ought not to misjudge this business, Watson.”

“No, we oughtn’t to,” I agreed, though, indeed, I could not help being amused by his earlier Shakespearean intonations, “the hound was genuine, after all. It could very well be that there is a living man dressing up as a ghost… though, by God, Holmes, I cannot fathom how he is not afraid of wandering in the wild in this weather. Other human beings may be unable to defeat him, but influenza surely would.”

 

It was not long after that that Mr. Andrew Keegan appeared on our doorstep. We had had our breakfast and our share of pleasant banter, and Holmes settled back in his armchair, lighting his clay pipe. His eyes were half-closed, but there was a brilliant inextinguishable gleam to them that I knew so well. God knows what he was thinking; had I not been certain that Keegan’s telegram was the only evidence at his disposal, I would have sworn that he already knew more of this case than I did.

There came a loud knock on the door.

“Do come in,” said Holmes, evenly. The door opened, and our visitor hesitantly entered the room. The first aspect of his appearance to strike my eye was how small he was; not short, exactly, for his proportions were those of a man of an average height, but small in every feature and every line of his sturdy body. And yet there was an air of such extraordinary dignity and confidence about him as if he were at least six feet tall. He had curly, shiny black hair, in its colour somewhat akin to Holmes’s, but so rich and wiry that it lay on his head in waves  - or rather, in one great wave of the sort that appears on the sea surface when a storm is about to begin.

“It is Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I presume,” he said in a quiet voice. I could hear now that he spoke with a faint hint of Irish brogue (so faint that the subtlety of it surprised me, for his name suggested a born Irishman).

Holmes breathed out a ring of blue smoke, his head lowered a fraction.

“At your service,” he said. “And this is my friend and associate Dr. John Watson. Pray do tell us, Mr. Keegan, what brought you here at such an hour? Did something-“ he looked at our client more closely now, and a hint of concern tensed his lips, “did something happen to your wife?”

“She disappeared, Mr. Holmes,” cried the Irishman, in his excitement caring not how Holmes knew it was his wife who was in trouble and if he had any wife at all. It was just as well, I believe, for Holmes hardly meant to surprise him with this observation; my friend simply stated what was to him an obvious fact, momentarily forgetting that we did not possess observational powers or deductive skills similar to his.

“On the yester evening, she went out to visit a neighbour of ours, and I have not seen her since then. I am worried sick. This is a dangerous place to be lost in, our valley, and how to think that she might not be lost-“ his voice shook with emotion, “-that somebody might have done her harm!..”

“But what about the ghost monk?” I asked.

“Oh, a nonsensical legend, a rumour. But I am told that she vanished near the ruins of the local abbey. It is not the phantom that frightens me – it is a man of flesh and blood who might wish for others to fear the supernatural.”

 “I understand,” Holmes put his pipe on the table, and contemplated Mr. Keegan with an air of utmost concentration, “that the circumstances are extremely upsetting to you, Mr. Keegan. But I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to sit down and tell us the whole story exactly as it had transpired. No small detail is too small to me.”

“But there isn’t much to tell,” said our client rather helplessly, still visibly struggling to regain his composure. “For truly there was nothing more worthy of your attention.”

“Then tell us everything that is, in your opinion, unworthy of our attention. Tell us the things that do not matter.”

Some of Mr. Keegan’s pallor gave way to a hot blush that spread over his freckled cheekbones, and for a moment he looked as though he were about to refuse to comply with Holmes’s extravagant demands (for which I would have blamed him not – surely they must have seemed rather unkind to the poor fellow, upset as he was), but I poured him some tea and attempted to reassure him that it was all to the end of finding his wife and that the more he’d tell Holmes, the better the chances would be she’d be found soon. Gradually, he calmed down and agreed to begin his story.

“Five years ago one of my uncles died and left me an estate in Aylesbury. I also came into a considerable sum of money, which allowed me to marry my dear Aideen. We left Dublin and came to live in our new house; we’ve lived there ever since, peacefully, happily, and rather uneventfully. I began to work as a carpenter, for it is not to my liking to lead a life of perfect idleness. As to Aideen, she would occasionally do some knitting for our friends and neighbours – she is terrific at knitting, my girl – but mostly she indulged her passion for all the things growing. She set up a small garden and bought herself books on botany, which she studied with much diligence.  I myself can recognize many trees and herbs, seeing as my parents were from countryside folk, but she read about all manners of plants so that soon I knew hardly a third of what she knew. And I’ve been told she is very good, too, by a local botanist who comes to visit us sometimes.”

“We soon made acquaintance of a Dr. Kendrick Maples, the Aylesbury practitioner. He was a decent man, and we liked to come to his house for a dinner and some friendly conversation; he was lonely, having no wife and no relatives, and appeared glad of our company.”

“Some six months ago, however, my wife told me that she’d like to sever our relationship with Maples. At the time, I did not know what to think. It had seemed to me that she found genuine pleasure in those visits, and without Maples to entertain us we would, for all intents and purposes, become hermits. Of course there was the botanist, Mr. Remak, and the other neighbour of ours – an old lady who sold us groceries – but they were not ones for telling stories over a game of cards.”

“I tried to get her to explain her peculiar request to me. Not only was I reluctant to treat Maples in such unbecoming a manner, but I was also worried that the reason for Aideen’s behaviour might have been that he had somehow hurt or offended her. By Jove I would have made him pay if he had so much as laid a finger on my wife! But Aideen denied that any kind of unpleasantness had taken place between them. What was I to do but believe her?”

Holmes was listening to Mr. Keegan’s account, his fingertips put together as was his custom. He had not interrupted the man once; and his expression assumed a dreamy quality to it, his thin arched eyebrows relaxed and his lips parted slightly.

Now, however, he started a little and looked straight at Keegan.

“So you complied with her wishes,” Holmes said. “That much I understand. But why did you change your mind now? Is Mrs. Keegan not displeased that you are visiting Maples again?”

“How the devil did you know that I’m visiting him again?” cried our visitor. “I never told you anything to this effect! Can it be that by some mad chance you are aware of what had transpired yesterday in Aylesbury?”

Though I suppose I ought to have known better than that, I was equally nonplussed and awestruck. Of course I had seen Holmes deduce most extraordinary things from mere trifles; but there were trifles, at least. This time, he knew nothing but the man’s name – surely this was not enough to draw any kind of reasonable conclusion from Mr. Keegan’s story. Suppose even, I thought, Holmes had divined something from Mr. Keegan’s attire and demeanour; but how could he possibly determine that these peculiarities bore any relation to the character of the mysterious friend of the Keegans, who was, naturally, unknown to him?

“Really, Holmes,” I murmured. “I cannot help but think that it was guess-work on your part.”

“O, I assure you, Mr. Keegan, that I’ve no knowledge of your circumstances,” said Holmes, raising his hand in a soothing gesture. “And you, Watson, are admirably stubborn in trying to find luck and coincidence behind what really is a very simple chain of reasoning.”

“Indeed, the only things I know of Kendrick Maples are his name and his craft, but this information sufficed for me to conclude that Mr. and Mrs. Keegan have recently had a change in their attitude towards him.”

“Your boots, Mr. Keegan, are typical for a man who spends most of his time in the countryside. The rest of your clothes, however, are clearly meant to be worn anywhere but – the fabric of this frock coat, for one, strikes me as rather expensive. It is lambswool, if I am not mistaken. Considering this fact, it is somewhat surprising to observe that the coat is old and worn; surely now that you are in possession of some capital you could buy yourself a new one.”

“Why would one carry on wearing an old coat if he can afford to buy another? It must be either avarice, which you, Mr. Keegan, do not seem to be guilty of, or the fact that you do not have much use for the coat in question. You only occasionally visit London, and not to attend any kind of social events, either. What could it be, then, that you come to the city for? You told me that you have broken off your acquaintance with Dr. Kendrick Maples; it is only logical to assume that, once this had transpired, you began to find it rather awkward to use his professional services. Hence, you must have been consulting a different physician for a while now. You yourself said that Maples was ‘ _the_ local practitioner’ – the only doctor in the vicinity of your house. This meant that, should you wish to turn to somebody else for advice, there would be nothing left for you but go to London. The mystery of your coat was thus successfully solved: the only business you had in the capital was medical consultations, and so you did not deem it necessary to buy yourself any new clothes that would be better suited to the city life.”

“As to the fact that you’ve changed your attitudes towards Maples, it is simpler still – the very same coat told me as much. Though I see a recently made patch on your left pocket, it is also clear to me that this particular item of clothing was not cleaned in some time; moreover, from the creases I spy on the fabric I can conclude that it was rather carelessly thrown into a drawer or even an attic. This suggests that you thought you would not have any use for this coat in the future, which, in turn, simply had to mean that Maples has again assumed his role as your family doctor.”

Mr. Keegan seemed not so much relented as taken aback.

“So it is true what they say about you,” he muttered after a little while, contemplating Holmes with an expression of incredulity. “I... have never witnessed anything of this sort before, and I think I never shall.”

“You would be unlikely to believe me if I did not explain. And it is vital that you do, because time is of utmost importance now,” answered Holmes eagerly, and I saw that he was restraining himself from clenching his hands into fists. “The only reason we are not on a train to Aylesbury yet is because the next one does not depart until eight. But the more I know before I arrive there, the better, so by all means keep talking.”

Mr. Keegan nodded in obedience and gave a small tired smile. The first sunbeams coming through the window lit his face so as for us to see the dark circles under his eyes that bespoke a sleepless night. Contrasting with the sweet pink gold that flooded the room and reflected on all the silver kettles and spoons, the sickly colour of his countenance was all the more striking.

“Perhaps I had better tell you of the evening before her disappearance,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “As you have pointed out, Mr. Holmes, we have renewed our acquaintance with Dr. Maples; and indeed, yesterday we went to join him for dinner. His appearance had rather astonished me... I could not believe he’d dress in such a fanciful way for a simple evening with me and my wife. There even was a flower in his buttonhole, one I could not put a name on – something I’d never seen before. He had previously stricken me as a humble man with no liking for dandified city clothes; such was the change in him now that I couldn’t quite explain it to myself.”

“He was very pleasant to us, if a little strange, and we would have enjoyed ourselves but for Aideen’s decidedly downcast mood. She told us that she was feeling ill and even had Maples give her a thick shawl that she would not take off for the entire evening. Naturally I suggested that I take her home or that Maples examine her and see if he would be able to help, but she refused both offers utterly. I insisted.”

“Finally – it was around six o’clock, I believe – she succumbed to my urging, and we had said our goodbyes and drove home. She seemed to be feeling better; I was glad of that, and I hardly anticipated any more trouble to befall us.”

“And, indeed, we arrived home safely and were preparing to retire to bed when Aideen suddenly said that she had arranged with Mrs. Luthy, the neighbour lady I mentioned, to buy some eggs for breakfast.”

“I should have never let her go alone, Mr. Holmes. It was my mistake and I curse myself for it now. But she had always been an independent girl, and it was her habit to carry a pistol on her person. I was sure she would not let anyone harm her. She herself told me as much; she pointed out that there was only half a mile between our house and the house of Mrs. Luthy, and that it was not dark yet, all of which was God’s honest truth.”

“So I let her. I let her...” he made a motion as though to cover his face with his hands, but did not complete it; instead, he gripped his cup and swallowed the remaining tea the way a man downs something strong. “And she went, and never came back. I went to the local police station first thing in the morning, but they still have not found her.”

There, he lifted his gaze at us, his eyes transparent and hollow.

“On my way from the station I met one of the villagers, who told me that she saw my wife walking down the road the previous evening. And she swore, Mr. Holmes, that she also saw, as clearly as she could see me, a black figure in a cassock crossing the road and disappearing in the juniper bushes.”

“There are no real monks in the area, as I understand,” said Holmes with much thought.

“No, there are none. There are only the wretched ruins of the Aylesbury Abbey.”

A change came over my friend’s demeanour. He jumped to his feet, all swiftness, and proceeded to almost drag me out of my armchair.

“Quick,” he cried. “You told me all I need to know for now, Mr. Keegan. We ought not to miss the eight o’clock train!”

 

Holmes was exceptionally quiet on our way to the Chalfont&Latimer station and later, on the train that raced along what would become known as the Chesham branch. Only twice had he broken the silence: once to enquire whether Mr. Keegan remembered what the flower in Dr. Maples’ buttonhole looked like, and the other time to ask if Mr. Keegan went to Mrs. Luthy after his wife’s disappearance.

“Richly white,” said Mr. Keegan to Holmes’s first question. “Creamy. There was a little bit of pink, I trust, and it had yellow stamens, but otherwise it was as white as starched linen. And I think I spotted a leaf, too – that was what nonplussed me; it looked like a leaf of an evergreen plant, dark and waxy.”

“As to Mrs. Luthy, I’ve never contacted her. I went straight to you the moment I left the police station, Mr. Holmes.”

At this, Holmes’s face darkened visibly, and he nodded with gravity before turning away from us.

It is true that once or twice my friend accused me of being overly poetic and that at times I did, indeed, indulge my disposition for romanticism, but I fear that I had much difficulty imagining this case as something other than a romantic tale. For a while I toyed with various increasingly Byronic interpretations of Mr. Keegan’s story; however, Holmes’s gloomy demeanour suggested that there was something more serious to the affair than a runaway wife. And I myself was of the opinion that Aideen was a woman unlikely to abandon her husband in such rush a manner if not for some extraordinary circumstances.

The thought made me uneasy. I felt for the man, and I saw that it would be awfully hard on him if something did happen to his wife. But I consoled myself with the thought that, from what he had told us, Dr. Maples seemed to have no real motive for wishing any harm upon Mrs. Keegan; and without a motive, the hypothetical crime was but a fantasy.

The sun was shining over the fields and bushes of the countryside when we arrived at our destination. Nothing obscured our view; there was not a house, not a tree to be seen. Holmes jumped down from the platform, pulling the earflaps of his hat down.

“It is a mile from here,” said Mr. Keegan, “we can take horses from the station.”

“We had better go to Mrs. Luthy first,” Holmes responded at once. “We shall not be visiting Dr. Maples, not until I am sure of his role in the business.”

As we drove to Mrs. Luthy’s house, I studied the scenery. It would have been a very beautiful place but for the dark tufts of juniper sticking out here and there like the fur of some sleeping ancient creature. Curiously, amongst them I noticed some bushes of yew with its bright red berries.

The soil appeared to me very dry, with not a hint of any brook or stream; we were therefore progressing at a moderately good pace, the horses running lightly down the footworn road.

“That shall be where Mrs. Luthy lives,” said Mr. Keegan finally, pointing at a small wooden house on our right. There was considerably less juniper outside, and I seemed to spot a neat kitchen garden behind the main building.

We left the carriage on the road and walked towards the house. The elderly lady who opened the door started to greet us in the diffuse and lengthy manner distinctive of elderly countryside ladies, but Holmes interrupted her.

“You are Mrs. Luthy, are you not,” said he rather unceremoniously. The lady confirmed that, seemingly undisturbed by our lack of politeness. She had soft features, her skin thin to the point of fragility; somehow her face seemed to me made of softened candle wax.

“And you are the young Andrew Keegan, no doubt,” said she, addressing our client.

“So I am; but pray tell me, Mrs. Luthy – have you at all seen my wife yesterday? She made an arrangement with you, did she not?”

Surprise oozed slowly into her expression.

“I am afraid no such thing happened, Mr. Keegan,” said she. “Mrs. Keegan visited me two days ago. And I would have been glad to see more of her, for she is a sweet soul, but there was no arrangement as of yet.”

“I thought as much!” cried Holmes, turning on his heels. “Quick, quick! There is nothing to be found here! Goodbye, Mrs. Luthy.”

“We are grateful for your help,” I added before following Holmes, although in actuality I had no idea if that bizarre exchange had helped our cause and in what way.

“We may yet be on time,” he told us when we caught up with him. It was evident that great excitement had overtaken him, and his every movement was tense, as though he were a coiled spring of steel.

“O, Mr. Holmes, do you mean to say that Aideen is unharmed?” asked our client, relief written plainly on his face.

“I do not know the answer to this question,” answered Holmes, foggily. “But I assure you, Mr. Keegan, that I’ll do everything in my power to prevent her from coming to any further harm; you have my word on that.”

 

He then all but ran towards the carriage, gave some terse instructions to the driver, and the next moment I knew we were driving again, only at a considerably greater speed. Junipers and yews were shooting by, interspaced with occasional cottages. Clouds had now obscured the horizon; I feared that there would be a thunderstorm, one of these violent autumn ones. I remarked as much to Holmes.

“You are right, Watson,” he said with some worry. “It would be most disagreeable to us; the local police, I imagine, shall feel much the same.”

With that, he urged the driver to hurry and fell silent once again, his keen grey eyes flickering at the rapidly changing landscape.

“Where are we going now, Holmes?” I asked at last, no longer able to contain my impatience.

“To the Aylesbury abbey.”

“The abbey!” cried Mr. Keegan, “But why?”

“I shall explain,” Holmes answered. “For now, you must believe me that it is vital for our purposes.”

We soon turned onto another road, which was narrower and overgrown with yew even more than the fields we had seen before. The horses had difficulty tearing through the bushes, and neither of the two seemed to have taken kindly to the needles scratching their thin sensitive skin; soon, we were forced to stop and continue on foot, so agitated the poor beasts had become.

I would not have seen the ruins of the abbey had Mr. Keegan not pointed them out to me, for there was little left of the original building. The sight was grim; as are, I had an opportunity to observe, many a sight of those places where people had once lived but now live no more. The wind was now blowing wildly, and, as I had anticipated, the clouds turned the sky a menacing shade of violet. But, despite the sounds of the forthcoming storm, we all heard the quiet steps behind the bushes in front of us; it was a slow, deliberate gait of a man walking carefully so as not to stumble on the bumpy stone road. Holmes grabbed our sleeves and pulled us back, and I produced my revolver.

“Who the devil could that be?” murmured Mr. Keegan, and I saw that he, too, carried a firearm that he was now holding dangerously close to my back. I pushed it aside a little, reasoning that to be shot by one of Holmes’s clients would be too ridiculous an injury to receive.

The man walked closer to us and stopped. The only thing that prevented him from seeing me was a juniper branch full of dark poignant berries; first raindrops were accumulating on their surface, and with brief displeasure I thought that rain could dampen the powder. Then, he moved, and I moved in parallel to him, leaving both Holmes and Keegan behind.

A tall dark figure in a cassock appeared in front of me, surrounded in a shroud of drizzle and lit by muffled purple light.

Indeed, his appearance was ominous, and somebody more faint-hearted would have been driven to fear; but I knew better than to be afraid of any man, be he dead or alive.

“Who are you?” I asked, getting a better grip on the gun.

The man fumbled with his hood for a moment, then pulled it back.

“For God’s sake don’t shoot me,” he said, not so much in fright as with a faint hint of irritation. Now I could make out his face; he looked more than material, some fifty years of age, with wrinkles starting to form on his forehead and around his small eyes. “I merely went out to buy groceries.”

I contemplated this statement.

“And I am no ghost. Though it is true that I live here.”

“Have you any knowledge of Aideen Keegan?” asked a voice on my right, and I turned only to see Holmes storming out of the juniper. He held his hat in one hand, and his black hair was soaked with rainwater that dripped onto his cheeks and his nose.

Before the monk had any chance to answer his question, however, Holmes rushed past him and towards the abbey. Mr. Keegan was nowhere to be seen.

The monk gave me a questioning stare. I sighed and wiped the raindrops off my face.

“This is-“ I realized that I could no longer see Holmes’s gangling figure in the gathering rainy darkness, “-was my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, a consulting detective. My name is Dr. John Watson.”

“I am Geoffrey Johnson,” said he with a measure of courtesy. I was almost compelled to ask as to his health and his domestic affairs, so absurd that dialogue sounded to me, but my thoughts were interrupted.

“Watson!” came a shout from the abbey, “Watson, come here!”

There was such urgency in his voice that I took off immediately, not caring to explain the situation to my new acquaintance.

I had to jump over half-ruined stairs and to cross what seemed to have once been a broad corridor, but finally I felt my way towards the cell where Holmes stood, bending down over a heap of something white. There was a brilliant flash of lightning that outlined everything around me – Holmes’s sharp face, the stone walls of the cell, the grass on the floor – and I suddenly realized that I was looking at the body of a young girl in a creamy white dress, wet to the bone and dishevelled; but, as I rushed towards her and knelt down, I seemed to catch a flicker of colour on her cheeks.

To my great relief, she was breathing. But now that Holmes found his box of storm matches (which it was his habit to carry on him at all times) and lit one, I could see that her clothes were stained with blood; and it worried me that there was no visible external injury.

“She is alive and largely unharmed,” I summarized for Holmes’s benefit, “if she remained here for the entire night and that is all the blood she has lost, she should recover fairly soon. But she has suffered an internal injury of some sort, and I fear I cannot examine her in these conditions – she shall freeze. We must get her to the village.”

“Understood,” said Holmes shortly, and turned around. “Keegan! Keegan!”

We carried Mrs. Keegan back onto the road, where our carriage, thankfully, stood still (for a moment I found myself worrying that the driver might wish to flee, us being on the grounds of the infamous abbey) and drove to the village. Mr. Keegan was chalk white, holding the hands of his wife in his. During the drive, she did not regain consciousness, but merely lay on the seat, her chest rising and falling feverishly. Undoubtedly she would go down with a cold, I thought, if not with pneumonia.

“She shall be fine,” I told Keegan once. I am not sure he believed me then; understandably, he might have thought that I was but performing my duty as a physician, telling him the empty words of false consolation. And I cannot deny that there were occasions when I had done that – who that is devoted to his profession did not carry out this bitter ritual? But this time I was satisfied to think that what I was telling Keegan was God’s honest truth and that Holmes did – though I had not the foggiest as to how – save the life of Keegan’s wife.

I still did not know, however, what the source of the blood on her dress was.

“Watson,” I heard Holmes whisper in my ear. “By all means, examine her, but I am almost certain she has suffered no injury.”

“But the blood, it must be hers-“ I tried to object,

“-and so it is. But please do not tell this to Keegan. Think of something, say that you do not know, that you think this blood is that of her assailant.”

I was about to protest, but he cut me off again:

“For it is not an injury; it is a miscarriage.”

 

An hour later, I emerged from Mrs. Keegan’s room and told Holmes and Mr. Keegan that she was asleep and that she was likely to fully recover by the end of the month. The only damage her body had suffered, I said, was a direct result of lying on the ground in low autumn temperatures; but it looked to me as though she would be spared pneumonia, for the night was dry.

Mr. Keegan met that announcement with delight and proceeded to express his gratitude to us profusely and at length. Touched as I was by that, I ached for some brandy, food, and hot water; for I appeared to be covered in blood and mud from head to toe, my recently washed hands being the only exception. Besides, I was dying to hear just how Holmes worked it all out and who the girl’s attacker was.

There seemed to be little hope for the former, but the latter, at least, I was determined to have, especially as I had spotted a couple of men in police uniform wandering in the hall. Holmes had approached one of them and was now talking to him rapidly, his hands cutting the air in a series of emphatic gestures. I walked up to them; Holmes turned to me.

“Ah, Watson,” he said. “Inspector Heaney here says that Dr. Kendrick Maples has committed suicide. Apparently he swallowed some yew berries – they are, as you are no doubt aware, extremely poisonous.”

“So it was he who attacked Mrs. Keegan,” I cried. “But why on earth would he?”

Holmes shot a quick glance at the policeman and nodded carefully.

“It was him. I think we can take his suicide as a confession. As to the motive, it is very simple: he was trying to win her affections for a long time now, but has not been successful. Enraged, he chased her when she was on her way to Mrs. Luthy’s house, hit her on the head, and dragged her away to the abbey. He likely thought that he had killed her; and, stricken with remorse, he ended his own life.”

Inspector Heaney nodded benevolently. Now that I turned to study him I could see that he was a big man with a moustache so enormous that it resembled wings; in one’s mind’s eye, one could see it detaching itself from its owner’s face and flying away like some manner of wild bird.

“So ‘e did, young man, so ‘e did. If you only knew ‘ow many o’ ‘em I have seen! The bastards.”

Holmes muttered something to the effect of agreeing with him; then paced back and forth a little.

“Tell me,” he said, “was there a candytuft flower in his buttonhole?”

“Why no,” Heaney answered. “But there was a bramble flower. I don’t see, ‘owever, what difference it makes.”

“Oh, none whatsoever,” my friend said with sudden iciness. “In fact, I am sure they have crawled into his buttonhole entirely on their own account, both the candytuft and the bramble. Such is the habit of candytufts, Inspector. They tend to crawl.”

The unfortunate bobby stared at Holmes in utter astonishment, quite, it seemed, at a loss as to what to say to this unexpected botanical insight. Holmes took me by the hand and, my feeble protests notwithstanding, dragged me towards the main door.

“Good luck, Inspector,” he shouted, and then, “I wish you all the best, Mr. Keegan!”

And with that, off we were.

 

It was clear to me that what Holmes had told Heaney was pure nonsense. Too many parts of this theory simply did not fly – and then there was Aideen’s miscarriage, which, as I could ascertain, had indeed taken place that night. I debated with myself, of course, whether to obey Holmes and lie to Keegan or to disobey him and be truthful. But one important consideration stopped me from speaking up: Holmes evidently knew Aideen’s circumstances better than I, and so his request that I lie must have been inspired by his perceiving some trouble that would befall her if I told Keegan everything I knew. When Aideen recovered, to tell her husband the true story would be her own decision; but _I_ could never risk a patient’s wellbeing out of some misplaced sense of honesty. Let them think me incompetent, I thought, if that is the cost of ensuring Mrs. Keegan’s future happiness.

All the way home I was trying to get Holmes to talk, but he stubbornly refused to.

“Please, my dear fellow,” he said, “leave it until we are back to our lodgings. This story needs a pipe and a plateful of Mrs. Hudson’s rhubarb soup.”

 

It was only when we were sitting in our armchairs, cleaned of all the mud and warmed by the fire burning in the fireplace, that Holmes began to explain what had transpired. He crouched forward, the yellow light lining his aquiline face with sharp deep shadows, and looked at me briefly before lighting his black pipe.

“So you wished to know what has truly happened and why I wanted you to lie to Keegan,” he murmured, frowning deeply. “Yes. Hm. Of course what I told Heaney is utter rubbish. Kendrick Maples did not attack Aideen. Nobody did. Nobody did, Watson!”

“But how?.. Are you saying it was a suicide attempt?”

“No,” he shook his head energetically. “I feared for a moment that it could be, but, thankfully, the girl was not so desperate as to try and take her own life – otherwise she would have undoubtedly succeeded. What did you observe while examining her?”

I thought for a while.

“It certainly looked as though she had a mild poisoning, although I cannot say what the poison was. There was an awful lot of yew berries there – that must have been it. The symptoms certainly match.”

“Your medical expertise and your common sense do not fail you, my dear Watson. It was the yew berries. And she did take them herself, though not for the purpose of committing suicide; it was the baby she wished to get rid of.”

“Foeticide, you mean,” I said, slowly.

“Yes. Foeticide. You see, it all fell into place almost the instance I heard Keegan’s story. Mrs. Keegan’s wish to part ways with Dr. Maples was nought in itself, but there were other details that suggested to me that she had, in a moment of weakness, succumbed to him; the flower, above all, convinced me of that.”

“The flower?”

“Maples must have been aware that Mrs. Keegan is a student of botany, and what Keegan described sounded startlingly like candytuft. In the language of flowers, it means ‘indiffirence’. Keegan’s account of their evening with Maples prompted me to think that Aideen might have been expecting. Her sickness was, no doubt, partially inspired by the fact that she was uncomfortable in Maples’s presence; but partially it must have been her condition. Why was she covering herself with a thick shawl? Keegan, who had seen her every day, could not notice the change in her forms, but Maples – with whom she met for the first time in half a year – was bound to notice. He was a physician, after all. And she did not wish to reveal the fact, not to him, not after she had noticed the flower in his buttonhole.”

“After they returned home, Aideen, under the excuse of having to go to Mrs. Luthy, went to the abbey and ate the berries. She of course knew about the rumours of the ghost monk; she did not believe them herself, but it was her hope that, should she die or be found while miscarrying, everyone would believe that she was harmed by the spectre.”

“This is all very neat, Holmes,” I responded, doubtful, “but how on earth could she know that the baby was Maples’s? And who is Geoffrey Johnson, the monk we met? In all that tumult I have forgotten about him altogether.”

“Undoubtedly no more than a local eccentric,” said Holmes. “The legend of the abbey must be keeping the Aylesbury folk well clear of the site, allowing him to use it however he pleases.”

“As to Aideen, I do not think she did know. But the thought that it might turn out to resemble Maples, or that she would be forced to further deceive her husband, was driving her to despair. She was not thinking straight.”

I realized now the cause of his black mood. Before us there was the gravest of injustices – an injustice not to be mended; one to never be revealed. And it pained me to think that it still had the potential to harm the lives of two people whom we, the essence of whose crafts was in helping others, could not help.

“We could report her, of course,” said he, registering the expression of distress on my face. “But what good would it bring to anyone? What kind of justice would it be – to imprison her? She will be the judge of herself; what she did shall forever dawn upon her conscience.”

The fact that I remained silent must have, I think, alarmed Holmes, because he put his pipe aside and was looking straight at me, biting his lower lip.

“I understand that to keep silent about it is, from the point of view of a true medical man such as yourself, a questionable deed,” he said with hesitation, “but do you not agree with me, Watson?”

“Of course I agree with you,” I cried, almost resentful that he thought me capable of wishing to ruin the young girl. “Or do you imagine that I count her amongst maniacs and cold-blooded murderers? Or that I’d prefer her, who was already seduced and abandoned in a most disgraceful manner, to be imprisoned, leaving her husband inconsolable and her, alone and tormented? It is simply that I-“ here, I fell silent and gestured vaguely, unsure of what it was that I wanted to say. Holmes looked up at me, and a feeble smile lit his features.

“Exactly, my dear fellow,” he mimicked my gestures to the best of his ability. “Exactly.”

For a while neither of us spoke. Then Holmes took his glass and sighed.

“There are cases upon solving which one cannot help but wonder when the world went all awry,” he said, rather miserably. “Let us drink, Watson... Let us drink to the power of human compassion; to the virtue of mercifulness; and to the closeness of hearts. Let us drink to the closeness of hearts. All too often it is the only thing that saves people in the times of darkness.”

I raised my glass, and we drank to that.

**Author's Note:**

> hi fandom! I'm a long-time Holmesian, but, weirdly, that's my first ACD Holmes fanfic. *waves shyly* I'm glad to join you.
> 
> Please feel free to offer criticism and point out any mistakes.
> 
> *The dried powder of yew berries was often used to induce miscarriage. It was very dangerous and would often lead to serious health problems or even death.
> 
> *Language of flowers was a major obsession of the Victorians. It was in this time period that tussie-mussies emerged.


End file.
